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Comment by wool_gather | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate on the problem you see with the word "toot"?

It's an onomatopoeic term for briefly sounding a horn, but I almost never hear it used for that. In my experience, there are two primary uses of the word in American English:

1) In the expression toot [one's] own horn, which means to praise oneself. Often in the form "I don't want to toot my own horn, but [...]".

2) A cutesy word for a fart, used primarily when talking to young children.

Notably, an elephant using its trunk to make noise is said to be trumpeting, not tooting.

Isn't 1) exactly what tooting and tweeting both are really about, though?

Tooting is a more wholesome activity. Tweeting is an inherently performative act due to the nature of the platform. To toot is to be.

> Notably, an elephant using its trunk to make noise is said to be trumpeting, not tooting.

So if Mr Trump was on Mastodon would we say he was tooting or trumpeting?

So I'm born and raised in the US Midwest, and in my entire life 'toot' was never used as euphemism for 'fart' except in the context of the elementary school rhyme. I can perfectly understand people not liking the sound of the word or even how it looks, but the fart connotation seems like a manufactured rationale to me. Actually, for the population that would possibly use the word that way, i.e. 8 year-olds, the usage would be a positive feature, not a negative.

It may not have that meaning for you, but it does for others. It's nothing manufactured.

And, for many people, it's the only meaning that naturally comes to mind in phrases like "I tooted" or "Joe tooted".

Beans beans, the musical fruit. The more you eat, the more you toot.

Aside from "toot my own horn" the only other uses of the term I can think of are:

Kids impersonating the noise a train horn makes.

A word for farting.

The only context in which you'd normally say that someone "tooted" is the latter.

It's clearly an attempt to make people think about "tweet" without infringing copyright/trademark, much like the way the generic Dr. Pepper at the grocery store might be called "Dr. Skipper". Mastodon should come up with its own concepts.

Nope. Hbomberguy suggested it jokingly, and then it was done.

https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/100419966679180204

Not everything is a cynical ploy. There are still pure and wholesome things in this world.

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